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Get Product DemoHow do beauty and wellness managers actually build schedules? That question drove a ground-up rethink of the employee scheduling experience - from bulk actions and draft workflows to cross-center visibility and built-in PTO tracking. Here are five changes worth knowing about.
Gita Mani
Employee scheduling looks simple on the surface. Pick a person, assign a shift, repeat. But anyone who’s managed a busy salon, spa, or wellness center knows the reality is messier: overlapping availability, last-minute swaps, multiple locations, and a calendar that needs to be right before the first guest walks in.
We spent months talking to the managers who live inside Zenoti’s scheduling tools every day. What we heard wasn’t about missing features. It was about friction: too many clicks to do routine things, too much context lost switching between views, too little visibility into what’s happening across locations. The schedule had the information. It just made managers work too hard to get to it.
The new employee scheduling experience is our response. As a key contributor to this effort, Saikumar Boda, Senior Manager of Product Management, led internal walkthroughs and cross-team discussions to ensure the new experience reflects both customer feedback and long-term product direction.
Switching between day, week, and month views used to feel like navigating between three different tools, each with different controls, editing patterns, and muscle memory. For managers toggling between views dozens of times a day, that inconsistency added up.
Now, all three views share the same interaction patterns, layouts, and controls. Build a shift in the day view and you already know how to do it in the week view. The result is less re-orienting, fewer errors from context switching, and a noticeably faster workflow, especially for new managers still learning the system.
Even when staffing patterns stayed consistent week to week, managers had to recreate them manually: setting hours one employee at a time, copying entries individually, repeating the same steps across days and locations.
The new experience introduces bulk actions designed around how managers actually work. Select multiple employees and apply shifts in one action. Copy entire shift patterns forward across days, weeks, or months, preserving times, statuses, and room assignments. Cut and paste to reorganize without starting over. Smarter time entry suggests logical start and end times, and filters stay active while you work. For businesses with stable schedules, what used to take the better part of a morning can now be done in minutes.
Publishing a schedule used to be a leap of faith. There was no way to share a work-in-progress with the team before it went live, so managers would hit publish and immediately field a wave of questions, swap requests, and corrections.
Now managers can build schedules in draft mode, share them with employees through myZen, the staff-facing mobile app, and collect feedback before anything goes live. Employees can review upcoming shifts and flag conflicts or request adjustments directly. Draft schedules are visually distinct on the calendar – tagged and bordered so there’s never confusion about what’s final and what’s still in progress. When the manager is ready, publishing is a single action backed by real input from the team.
Related: 9 ways to reduce staff turnover in salons and spas in 2026 | The Check-In
For brands with multiple locations, an ongoing headache was figuring out whether someone was already scheduled elsewhere. The workaround (switching centers, opening multiple views, or simply asking around) was slow and unreliable.
The new experience surfaces cross-center scheduling directly in the calendar. When an employee is booked at another location, a visual indicator appears on their schedule entry. Hover over it to see the location and shift details instantly. No switching tabs, no guesswork – just the information managers need to avoid double-booking and plan coverage with confidence.
Tracking vacation, training, and other paid time off used to mean extra steps outside the staff scheduling workflow. Managers had to navigate to separate pages, enter hours one day at a time, and rely on memory to go back and fill in the gaps before payroll closed.
Now managers can plan non-working hours directly in the schedule. PTO, vacation, and other compensable time can be applied across multiple days, copied forward like regular shifts, and reviewed alongside the rest of the team’s availability. One place for scheduling and payroll accuracy.
Alongside these five changes, the refreshed experience introduces a cleaner visual system with color-coded indicators, a built-in legend, and streamlined alerts, plus a framework designed to scale reliably as your team grows.
This update lays the groundwork for what’s next: smarter recommendations, predictive staffing, and deeper automation. The foundation starts here, however, with a scheduling experience that’s faster, clearer, and built around how beauty and wellness teams actually operate.
The new employee scheduling experience is rolling out now. We’ll keep listening, and we’ll keep building.
Ready to go beyond the schedule? Discover how Zenoti helps you develop, motivate, and grow your team – all from one dashboard.
Written by
Gita Mani, Senior Content Specialist
